In a millimeter frequency band, communications are interrupted by an obstacle due to linear propagation. Accordingly, beamforming is required to maintain a Light-of-Sight (LOS) environment and to accomplish smooth communication even in a non-LOS environment.
A transceiver for the beamforming typically employs a heterodyne structure, and includes a Radio Frequency (RF) stage, a Local Oscillator (LO) stage, and an Intermediate Frequency (IF) stage. The transceiver is divided into a transmitter and a receiver, and its antenna is also divided into a transmitting antenna and a receiving antenna.
However, such a structure increases a chip size and power consumption by the number of blocks of the IF stage.
Since the transmitter and the receiver are separated, the LO stage requires the transmitter and the receiver respectively, thus increasing the chip size and the power consumption. Further, since the transmitting antenna and the receiving antenna are separated, a certain number of antennas are required for the transmission and the reception and thus an RF packet size increases.